Tooloobaun Church (in ruins), Tooloobauntemple, Co. Galway

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Tooloobaun Church (in ruins), Tooloobauntemple, Co. Galway

Inside this late-medieval church ruin in County Galway, tucked into the north-east corner of a graveyard in rolling pastureland, someone at some point decided to divide the building in two.

A wall was inserted towards the western end, and behind it, a small barrel-vaulted chamber was created, measuring roughly five and a half metres by three. The peculiar thing is that neither the dividing wall nor the vault were bonded into the original north and south walls of the church; they were simply slotted in, as if the addition were always understood to be a modification rather than an integral part of the structure. How anyone reached the space above the vault, and what that upper space was even for, remains genuinely unclear.

The church itself is rectangular, measuring about thirteen metres east to west and nearly six metres across, with walls of well-dressed and mortared limestone laid in random courses. The west gable survives to its original height of around five metres, and the south wall stands close to full height at three and a half metres, making it the most legible part of the building today. Towards the eastern end of that south wall, the embrasure of a window survives, and beneath it inside the church is a fluted piscina set into a pointed arched alcove. A piscina is a shallow stone basin used by a priest to rinse his hands and the sacred vessels during Mass, and its presence here confirms the building's liturgical function. The east gable, by contrast, has largely collapsed to about a metre. A standing stone sits roughly twenty-five metres to the north of the church, predating the medieval structure entirely and hinting at the longer human attachment to this particular patch of ground. O'Flanagan noted the site in 1927.

The church is heavily overgrown with ivy, and the interior contains a number of graves alongside scattered architectural fragments. A broken stoup, a basin for holy water, was reported just inside the south doorway by an earlier observer, though it was not found on subsequent inspection. The partly collapsed doorway through the inserted dividing wall still gives access to the vaulted chamber, though the state of the masonry makes the approach cautious work.

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